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JAMES POTT & CO. 

PUBLISHERS, 
NEW YORK. 



PAX VOBISCUM 



HENRY DRUMMOND, F.R.S.E., F.G.S., LL.D. 

AUTHOR OF "NATURAL LAW IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD, 
"TROPICAL AFRICA," ETC. 



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AUTHOR'S POPULAR EDITION. 



APR 

NEW YORK, 5t>VJ? 

JAMES POTT & CO., PUBLISHERS, ^ b S 
14 and 16 Astor Place. 
1892. 



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Copyright, 1890, by 
JAMES POTT & CO. 



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" Pax Vobiscum," prepared for publication by the Au- 
thor, is now published for the first time, being the second 
of a series of which " The Greatest Thing in the World " 
was the first. 

James Pott & Co. 
Nov. i, 1890. 



" Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I 
will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me ; for 
I am meek and lowly in heart : and ye shall find rest unto your 
souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." 



CONTENTS 



Preface, 3 

Pax Vobiscum, 9 

Effects Require Causes, . . . .12 
What Yokes are for, . / . . 23 

How Fruits Grow, . . . . -27 



PAX VOBISCUM. 

I heard the other morning a sermon by a distinguished 
preacher upon " Rest." It was full of beautiful thoughts ; 
but when I came to ask myself, "How does he say I can 
get Rest? " there was no answer. The sermon was sin- 
cerely meant to be practical, yet it contained no experi- 
ence that seemed to me to be tangible, nor any advice 
which could help me to find the thing itself as I went 
about the world that afternoon. Yet this omission of the 
only important problem was not the fault of the preacher. 
The whole popular religion is in the twilight here. And 
when pressed for really working specifics for the experi- 
ences with which it deals, it falters, and seems to lose 
itself in mist. 

The want of connection between the great words of 
religion and every-day life has bewildered and discour- 
aged all of us. Christianity possesses the noblest words 
in the language ; its literature overflows with terms ex- 
pressive of the greatest and happiest moods which can 
fill the soul of man. Rest, Joy, Peace, Faith, Love, 
Light — these words occur with such persistency in hymns 
and prayers that an observer might think they formed 
the staple of Christian experience. But on coming to 
close quarters with the actual life of most of us, how 
surely would he be disenchanted. I do not think we 
ourselves are aware how much our religious life is made 
up of phrases ; how much of what we call Christian ex- 



IO PAX VOBISCUM. 

perience is only a dialect of the Churches, a mere relig- 
ious phraseology with almost nothing behind it in what 
we really feel and know. 

To some of us, indeed, the Christian experiences seem 
further away than when we took the first steps in the 
Christian life. That life has not opened out as we had 
hoped ; we do not regret our religion, but we are disap- 
pointed with it. There are times, perhaps, when wander- 
ing notes from a diviner music stray into our spirits ; but 
these experiences come at few and fitful moments. We 
have no sense of possession in them. When they visit 
us, it is a surprise. When they leave us, it is without ex- 
planation. When we wish their return, we do not know 
how to secure it. 

All which points to a religion without solid base, and 
a poor and flickering life. It means a great bankruptcy 
in those experiences which give Christianity its personal 
solace and make it attractive to the world, and a great 
uncertainty as to any remedy. It is as if we knew every- 
thing about health — except the way to get it. 

I am quite sure that the difficulty does not He in the 
fact that men are not in earnest. This is simply not the 
fact. All around us Christians are wearing themselves 
out in trying to be better. The amount of spiritual long- 
ing in the world — in the hearts of unnumbered thousands 
of men and women in whom we should never suspect it ; 
among the wise and thoughtful ; among the young and 
gay, who seldom assuage and never betray their thirst — 
this is one of the most wonderful and touching facts of 
life. It is not more heat that is needed, but more light ; 
not more force, but a wiser direction to be given to very 
real energies already there. 



PEACE BE WITH YOU. I I 

The Address which follows is offered as a humble con- 
tribution to this problem, and in the hope that it may- 
help some who are " seeking Rest and finding none " to a 
firmer footing on one great, solid, simple principle which 
underlies not the Christian experiences alone, but all ex- 
periences, and all life. 

What Christian experience wants is thread, a vertebral 
column, method. It is impossible to believe that there 
is no remedy for its unevenness and dishevelment, or that 
the remedy is a secret. The idea, also, that some few 
men, by happy chance or happier temperament, have 
been given the secret — as if there were some sort of 
knack or trick of it — is wholly incredible. Religion must 
ripen its fruit for every temperament ; and the way even 
into its highest heights must be by a gateway through 
which the peoples of the world may pass. 

I shall try to lead up to this gateway by a very familiar 
path. But as that path is strangely unfrequented, and 
even unknown, where it passes into the religious sphere, I 
must dwell for a moment on the commonest of common- 
places. 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 

Nothing that happens in the world happens by chance. 
God is a God of order. Everything is arranged upon 
definite principles, and never at random. The world, 
even the religious world, is governed by law. Character 
is governed by law. Happiness is governed by law. The 
Christian experiences are governed by law. Men, for- 
getting this, expect Rest, Joy, Peace, Faith to drop into 
their souls from the air like snow or rain. But in point of 
fact they do not do so ; and if they did they would no less 
have their origin in previous activities and be controlled 
by natural laws. Rain and snow do drop from the air, 
but not without a long previous history. They are the 
mature effects of former causes. Equally so are Rest, 
and Peace, and Joy. They, too, have each a previous 
history. Storms and winds and calms are not accidents, 
but are brought about by antecedent circumstances. Rest 
and Peace are but calms in man's inward nature, and 
arise through causes as definite and as inevitable. 

Realize it thoroughly : it is a methodical not an acci- 
dental world. If a housewife turns out a good cake, it 
is the result of a sound receipt, carefully applied. She 
cannot mix the assigned ingredients and fire them for the 
appropriate time without producing the result. It is not 
she who has made the cake ; it is nature. She brings re- 
lated things together ; sets causes at work ; these causes 
bring about the result. She is not a creator, but an in- 
termediary. She does not expect random causes to pro- 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 1 3 

duce specific effects — random ingredients would only 
produce random cakes. So it is in the making of 
Christian experiences. Certain lines are followed ; cer- 
tain effects are the result. These effects cannot but be 
the result. But the result can never take place without 
the previous cause. To expect results without anteced- 
ents is to expect cakes without ingredients. That impos- 
sibility is precisely the almost universal expectation. 

Now what I mainly wish to do is to help ycu firmly to 
grasp this simple principle of Cause and Effect in the 
spiritual world. And instead of applying the principle 
generally to each of the Christian experiences in turn, I 
shall examine its application to one in some little detail. 
The one I shall select is Rest. And I think any one 
who follows the application in this single instance will be 
able to apply it for himself to all the others. 

Take such a sentence as this : African explorers are 
subject to fevers which cause restlessness and delirium. 
Note the expression, "cause restlessness." Restlessness 
has a cause. Clearly, then, any one who wished to get rid 
of restlessness would proceed at once to deal with the 
cause. If that were not removed, a doctor might pre- 
scribe a hundred things, and all might be taken in turn, 
without producing the least effect. Things are so ar- 
ranged in the original planning of the world that certain 
effects must follow certain causes, and certain causes 
must be abolished before certain effects can be removed. 
Certain parts of Africa are inseparably linked with the 
physical experience called fever ; this fever is in turn in- 
fallibly linked with a mental experience called restlessness 
and delirium. To abolish the mental experience the rad- 
ical method would be to abolish the physical experience, 



14 PAX VOBISCUM. 

and the way of abolishing the physical experience would 
be to abolish Africa, or to cease to go there. Now this 
holds good for all other forms of Restlessness. Every 
other form and kind of Restlessness in the world has a 
definite cause, and the particular kind of Restlessness can 
only be removed by removing the allotted cause. 

All this is also true of Rest. Restlessness has a cause : 
must not Rest have a cause? Necessarily. If it were a 
chance world we would not expect this; but, being a 
methodical world, it cannot be otherwise. Rest, physical 
rest, moral rest, spiritual rest, every kind of rest has a 
cause, as certainly as restlessness. Now causes are dis- 
criminating. There is one kind of cause for every par- 
ticular effect, and no other ; and if one particular effect 
is desired, the corresponding cause must be set in motion. 
It is no use proposing finely devised schemes, or going 
through general pious exercises in the hope that somehow 
Rest will come. The Christian life is not casual but 
causal. All nature is a standing protest against the ab- 
surdity of expecting to secure spiritual effects, or any 
effects, without the employment of appropriate causes. 
The Great Teacher dealt what ought to have been the 
final blow to this infinite irrelevancy by a single question, 
" Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles? " 

Why, then, did the Great Teacher not educate His 
followers fully? Why did He not tell us, for example, 
how such a thing as Rest might be obtained? The an- 
swer is, that He did. But plainly, explicitly, in so many 
words? Yes, plainly, explicitly, in so many words. He 
assigned Rest to its cause, in words with which each of 
us has been familiar from his earliest childhood. 

He begins, you remember — for you at once know the 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 1 5 

passage I refer to — almost as if Rest could be had without 
any cause: "Come unto me," He says, "and I will give 
you Rest." 

Rest, apparently, was a favour to be bestowed ; men 
had but to come to Him ; He would give it to every 
applicant. But the next sentence takes that all back. 
The qualification, indeed, is added instantaneously. For 
what the first sentence seemed to give was next thing 
to an impossibility. For how, in a literal sense, can 
Rest be given ? One could no more give away Rest than 
he could give away Laughter. We speak of " causing " 
laughter, which we can do; but we cannot give it away. 
When we speak of giving pain, we know perfectly well we 
cannot give pain away. And when we aim at giving 
pleasure, all that we do is to arrange a set of circum- 
stances in such a way as that these shall cause pleasure. 
Of course there is a sense, and a very wonderful sense, in 
which a Great Personality breathes upon all who come 
within its influence an abiding peace and trust. Men 
can be to other men as the shadow of a great rock in a 
thirsty land. Much more Christ ; much more Christ as 
Perfect Man ; much more still as Saviour of the world. 
But it is not this of which I speak. When Christ said 
He would give men Rest, He meant simply that He 
would put them in the way of it. By no act of convey- 
ance would, or could, He make over His own Rest to 
them. He could give them His receipt for it. That was 
all. But He would not make it for them ; for one thing, 
it was not in His plan to make it for them ; for another 
thing, men were not so planned that it could be made for 
them ; and for yet another thing, it was a thousand times 
better that they should make it for themselves. 



1 6 PAX VOBISCUM. 

That this is the meaning becomes obvious from the 
wording of the second sentence : " Learn of Me and ye 
shall find Rest." Rest, that is to say, is not a thing that 
can be given, but a thing to be acquired. It comes not 
by an act, but by a process.' It is not to be found in a 
happy hour, as one finds a treasure ; but slowly, as one 
finds knowledge. .It could indeed be no more found in 
a moment than could knowledge. A soil has to be pre- 
pared for it. Like a fine fruit, it will grow in one climate 
and not in another ; at one altitude and not at another. 
Like all growths it will have an orderly development and 
mature by slow degrees. 

The nature of this slow process Christ cl early defines 
when He says we are to achieve Rest by learning. 
" Learn of Me," He says, " and ye shall find rest to your 
souls." Now consider the extraordinary originality of this 
utterance. How novel the connection between these two 
words, "Learn" and "Rest"? How few of us have 
ever associated them — ever thought that Rest was a thing 
to be learned ; ever laid ourselves out for it as we would 
to learn a language ; ever practised it as we would prac- 
tise the violin? Does it not show, how entirely new 
Christ's teaching still is to the world, that so old and 
threadbare an aphorism should still be so little applied? 
The last thing most of us would have thought of would 
have been to associate Rest with Work. 

What must one work at? What is that which if duly 
learned will find the soul of man in Rest? Christ an- 
swers without the least hesitation. He specifies two 
things — Meekness and Lowliness. " Learn of Me," He 
says, "for I am meek and lowly in heart." Now these 
two things are not chosen at random. To these accom- 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 1 7 

plishments, in a special way, Rest is attached. Learn 
these, in short, and you have already found Rest. These 
as they stand are direct causes of Rest ; will produce it 
at once ; cannot but produce it at once. And if you 
think for a single moment, you will see how this is neces- 
sarily so, for causes are never arbitrary, and the connec- 
tion between antecedent and consequent here and every- 
where lies deep in the nature of things. 

What is the connection, then? I answer by a further 
question. What are the chief causes of Unrest ? If you 
know yourself, you will answer Pride, Selfishness, Ambi- 
tion. As you look back upon the past years of your life, 
is it not true that its unhappiness has chiefly come from 
the succession of personal mortifications and almost 
trivial disappointments which the intercourse of life has 
brought you? Great trials come at lengthened intervals, 
and we rise to breast them ; but it is the petty friction of 
our every-day life with one another, the jar of business or 
of work, the discord of the domestic circle, the collapse 
of our ambition, the crossing of our will or the taking 
down of our conceit, which make inward peace impossi- 
ble. Wounded vanity, then, disappointed hopes, unsatis- 
fied selfishness — these are the old, vulgar, universal 
sources of man's unrest. 

Now it is obvious why Christ pointed out as the two 
chief objects for attainment the exact opposites of these. 
To Meekness and Lowliness these things simply do not 
exist. They cure unrest by making it impossible. These 
remedies do not trifle with surface symptoms ; they strike 
at once at removing causes. The ceaseless chagrin of 
a self-centred life can be removed at once by learn- 
ing Meekness and Lowliness of heart. He who learns 



1 8 PAX VOBISCUM. 

them is forever proof against it. He lives henceforth a 
charmed life. Christianity is a fine inoculation, a trans- 
fusion of healthy blood into an anaemic or poisoned 
soul. No fever can attack a perfectly sound body ; no 
fever of unrest can disturb a soul which has breathed the 
air or learned the ways of Christ. Men sigh for the 
wings of a dove that they may fly away and be at Rest. 
But flying away will not help us. "The Kingdom of 
God is within yon" We aspire to the top to look for 
Rest ; it lies at the bottom. Water rests only when it 
gets to the lowest place. So do men. Hence, be lowly. 
The man who has no opinion of himself at all can never 
be hurt if others do not acknowledge him. Hence, be 
meek. He who is without expectation cannot fret if 
nothing comes to him. It is self-evident that these things 
are so. The lowly man and the meek man are really 
above all other men, above all other things. They dom- 
inate the world because they do not care for it. The 
miser does not possess gold, gold possesses him. But 
the meek possess it. " The meek," said Christ, " inherit 
the earth." They do not buy it ; they do not conquer 
it ; but they inherit it. 

There are people who go about the world looking out 
for slights, and they are necessarily miserable, for they 
find them at every turn — especially the imaginary ones. 
One has the same pity for such men as for the very poor. 
They are the morally illiterate. They have had no real edu- 
cation, for they have never learned how to live. Few men 
know how to live. We grow up at random, carrying into 
mature life the merely animal methods and motives which 
we had as little children. And it does not occur to us 
that all this must be changed ; that much of it must be 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 1 9 

reversed ; that life is the finest of the Fine Arts ; that it 
has to be learned with lifelong patience, and that the 
years of our pilgrimage are all too short to master it tri- 
umphantly. 

Yet this is what Christianity is for — to teach men the 
Art of Life. And its whole curriculum lies in one word 
— " Learn of me." Unlike most education, this is almost 
purely personal ; it is not to be had from books or lect- 
ures or creeds or doctrines. It is a study from the life. 
Christ never said much in mere words about the Christian 
graces. He lived them, He was them. Yet we do not 
merely copy Him. We learn His art by living with 
Him, like the old apprentices with their masters. 

Now we understand it all? Christ's invitation to the 
weary and heavy-laden is a call to begin life over again 
upon a new principle — upon His own principle. " Watch 
My way of doing things," He says. " Follow Me. Take 
life as I take it. Be meek and lowly and you will find 
Rest." 

I do not say, remember, that the Christian life to every 
man, or to any man, can be a bed of roses. No educa- 
tional process can be this. And perhaps if some men 
knew how much was involved in the simple " learn " of 
Christ, they would not enter His school with so irrespon- 
sible a heart. For there is not only much to learn, but 
much to unlearn. Many men never go to this school at 
all till their disposition is already half ruined and char- 
acter has taken on its fatal set. To learn arithmetic is diffi- 
cult at fifty — much more to learn Christianity. To learn 
simply what it is to be meek and lowly, in the case of one 
who has had no lessons in that in childhood, may cost 
him half of what he values most on earth. Do we realize, 



20 PAX VOBISCUM. 

for instance, that the way of teaching humility is gener- 
ally by humiliation? There is probably no other school 
for it. When a man enters himself as a pupil in such a 
school it means a very great thing. There is much Rest 
there, but there is also much Work. 

I should be wrong, even though my theme is the 
brighter side, to ignore the cross and minimise the cost. 
Only it gives to the cross a more definite meaning, and a 
rarer value, to connect it thus directly and causally with the 
growth of the inner life. Our platitudes on the " benefits 
of affliction " are usually about as vague as our theories of 
Christian Experience. " Somehow," we believe affliction 
does us good. But it is not a question of " Somehow." 
The result is definite, calculable, necessary. It is under the 
strictest law of cause and effect. The first effect of losing 
one's fortune, for instance, is humiliation ; and the effect 
of humiliation, as we have just seen, is to make one hum- 
ble ; and the effect of being humble is to produce Rest. 
It is a roundabout way, apparently, of producing Rest ; 
but Nature generally works by circular processes ; and 
it is not certain that there is any other way of becoming 
humble, or of finding Rest. If a man could make him- 
self humble to order, it might simplify matters, but we do 
not find that this happens. Hence we must all go through 
the mill. Hence death, death to the lower self, is the 
nearest gate and the quickest road to life. 

Yet this is only half the truth. Christ's life outwardly 
was one of the most troubled lives that was ever lived : 
Tempest and tumult, tumult and tempest, the waves 
breaking over it all the time till the worn body was laid 
in the grave. But the inner life was a sea of glass. The 
great calm was always there. At any moment you might 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 21 

have gone to Him and found Rest. And even when the 
bloodhounds were dogging Him in the streets of Jerusa- 
lem, He turned to His disciples and offered them, as a last 
legacy, " My peace." Nothing ever for a moment broke 
the serenity of Christ's life on earth. Misfortune could not 
reach Him ; He had no fortune. Food, raiment, money 
— fountain-heads of half the world's weariness — He simply 
did not care for ; they played no part in His life ; He " took 
no thought " for them. It was impossible to affect Him by 
lowering His reputation ; He had already made Himself 
of no reputation. He was dumb before insult. When 
He was reviled He reviled not again. In fact, there was 
nothing that the world could do to Him that could ruffle 
the surface of His spirit. 

Such living, as mere living, is altogether unique. It is 
only when w r e see what it was in Him that we can know 
what the word Rest means. It lies not in emotions, nor 
in the absence of emotions. It is not a hallowed feeling 
that comes over us in church. It is not something that 
the preacher has in his voice. It is not in nature, or in 
poetry, or in music — though in all these there is soothing. 
It is the mind at leisure from itself. It is the perfect 
poise of the soul ; the absolute adjustment of the inward 
man to the stress of all outward things ; the preparedness 
against every emergency ; the stability of assured convic- 
tions ; the eternal calm of an invulnerable faith ; the re- 
pose of a heart set deep in God. It is the mood of the 
man who says, with Browning, " God's in His Heaven, 
all's well with the world." 

Two painters each painted a picture to illustrate his 
conception of rest. The first chose for his scene a still, 
lone lake among the far-off mountains. The second 



2 2 PAX VOBISCUM. 

threw on his canvas a thundering waterfall, with a fragile 
birch-tree bending over the foam; at the fork of a 
branch, almost wet with the cataract's spray, a robin sat 
on its nest. The first was only Stagnation; the last was 
Rest. For in Rest there are always two elements — tran- 
quillity and energy ; silence and turbulence ; creation and 
destruction ; fearlessness and fearfulness. This it was in 
Christ. 

It is quite plain from all this that whatever else He 
claimed to be or to do, He at least knew how to live. 
All this is the perfection of living, of living in the mere 
sense of passing through the world in the best way. 
Hence His anxiety to communicate His idea of life to 
others. He came, He said, to give men life, true life, a 
more abundant life than they were living ; " the life," as 
the fine phrase in the Revised Version has it, " that is life 
indeed." This is what He himself possessed, and it was 
this which He offers to all mankind. And hence His 
direct appeal for all to come to Him who had not made 
much of life, who were weary and heavy-laden. These 
He would teach His secret. They, also, should know 
"the life that is life indeed." 



WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. 

There is still one doubt to clear up. After the state- 
ment, " Learn of Me," Christ throws in the disconcerting 
qualification, "Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me." 
Why, if all this be true, does He call it a. yoke? Why, 
while professing to give Rest, does He with the next 
breath whisper "burden"} Is the Christian life, after 
all, what its enemies take it for — an additional weight to 
the already great woe of life, some extra punctiliousness 
about duty, some painful devotion to observances, some 
heavy restriction and trammelling of all that is joyous 
and free in the world? Is life not hard and sorrowful 
enough without being fettered with yet another yoke? 

It is astounding how so glaring a misunderstanding of 
this plain sentence should ever have passed into currency. 
Did you ever stop to ask what a yoke is really for? Is 
it to be a burden to the animal which wears it? It is 
just the opposite. It is to make its burden light. At- 
tached to the oxen in any other way than by a yoke, the 
plough would be intolerable. Worked by means of a 
yoke, it is light. A yoke is not an instrument of torture ; 
it is an instrument of mercy. It is not a malicious con- 
trivance for making work hard ; it is a gentle device to 
make hard labour light. It is not meant to give pain, but 
to save pain. And yet men speak of the yoke of Christ 
as if it were a slavery, and look upon those who wear it 
as objects of compassion. For generations we have had 
homilies on "The Yoke of Christ," some delighting in 



24 PAX VOBISCUM. 

portraying its narrow exactions; some seeking in these 
exactions the marks of its divinity ; others apologising for 
it, and toning it down ; still others assuring us that, al- 
though it be very bad, it is not to be compared with the 
positive blessings of Christianity. How many, especially 
among the young, has this one mistaken phrase driven 
forever away from the kingdom of God? Instead of 
making Christ attractive, it makes Him out a taskmaster, 
narrowing life by petty restrictions, calling for self-denial 
where none is necessary, making misery a virtue under 
the plea that it is the yoke of Christ, and happiness crim- 
inal because it now and then evades it. According to 
this conception, Christians are at best the victims of a de- 
pressing fate ; their life is a penance ; and their hope for 
the next world purchased by a slow martyrdom in this. 

The mistake has arisen from taking the word " yoke " 
here in the same sense as in the expressions "under the 
yoke," or " wear the yoke in his youth." But in Christ's 
illustration it is not xhejugum of the Roman soldier, but 
the simple " harness " or " ox-collar " of the Eastern peas- 
ant. It is the literal wooden yoke which He, with His 
own hands in the carpenter shop, had probably often 
made. He knew the difference between a smooth yoke 
and a rough one, a bad fit and a good fit ; the difference 
also it made to the patient animal which had to wear it. 
The rough yoke galled, and the burden was heavy ; the 
smooth yoke caused no pain, and the load was lightly 
drawn. The badly fitted harness was a misery ; the well- 
fitted collar was " easy." 

And what was the "burden"? It was not some spe- 
cial burden laid upon the Christian, some unique infliction 
that they alone must bear. It was what all men bear. 



WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. 25 

It was simply life, human life itself, the general burden of 
life which all must carry with them from the cradle to 
the grave. Christ saw that men took life painfully. To 
some it was a weariness, to others a failure, to many a 
tragedy, to all a struggle and a pain. How to carry this 
burden of life had been the whole world's problem. It 
is still the whole world's problem. And here is Christ's 
solution: "Carry it as I do. Take life as I take it. 
Look at it from My point of view. Interpret it upon My 
principles. Take My yoke and learn of Me, and you will 
find it easy. For My yoke is easy, works easily, sits right 
upon the shoulders, and therefore My burden is light." 

There is no suggestion here that religion will absolve 
any man from bearing burdens. That would be to ab- 
solve him from living, since it is life itself that is the 
burden. What Christianity does propose is. to make it 
tolerable. Christ's yoke is simply His secret for the al- 
leviation of human life, His prescription for the best and 
happiest method of living. Men harness themselves to 
the work and stress of the world in clumsy and unnatural 
ways. The harness they put on is antiquated. A rough, 
ill-fitted collar at the best, they make its strain and fric- 
tion past enduring, by placing it where the neck is most 
sensitive ; and by mere continuous irritation this sensitive- 
ness increases until the whole nature is quick and sore. 

This is the origin, among other things, of a disease 
called " touchiness " — a disease which, in spite of its in- 
nocent name, is one of the gravest sources of restlessness 
in the world. Touchiness, when it becomes chronic, is a 
morbid condition of the inward disposition. It is self- 
love inflamed to the acute point ; conceit, with a hair- 
trigger. The cure is to shift the yoke to some other 



2 6 PAX VOBISCUM. 

place ; to let men and things touch us through some new 
and perhaps as yet unused part of our nature ; to become 
meek and lowly in heart while the old nature is becoming 
numb, from want of use. It is the beautiful work of 
Christianity everywhere to adjust the burden of life to 
those who bear it, and them to it. It has a perfectly 
miraculous gift of healing. Without doing any violence 
to human nature it sets it right with life, harmonizing it 
with all surrounding things, and restoring those who are 
jaded with the fatigue and dust of the world to a new 
grace of living. In the mere matter of altering the per- 
spective of life and changing the proportions of things, 
its function in lightening the care of man is altogether its 
own. The weight of a load depends upon the attraction of 
the earth. But suppose the attraction of the earth were 
removed? A ton on some other planet, where the attrac- 
tion of gravity is less, does not weigh half a ton. Now 
Christianity removes the attraction of the earth ; and this is 
one way in which it diminishes men's burden. It makes 
them citizens of another world. What was a ton yester- 
day is not half a ton to-day. So without changing one's 
circumstances, merely by offering a wider horizon and a 
different standard, it alters the whole aspect of the world. 
Christianity as Christ taught is the truest philosophy of 
life ever spoken. But let us be quite sure when we speak 
of Christianity that we mean Christ's Christianity. Other 
versions are either caricatures, or exaggerations, or mis- 
understandings, or shortsighted and surface readings. 
For the most part their attainment is hopeless and the 
results wretched. But I care not who the person is, or 
through what vale of tears he has passed, or is about to 
pass, there is a new life for him along this path. 



HOW FRUITS GROW. 

Were Rest my subject, there are other things I should 
wish to say about it, and other kinds of Rest of which I 
should like to speak. But that is not my subject. My 
theme is that the Christian experiences are not the work 
of magic, but come under the law of Cause and Effect. 
And I have chosen Rest only as a single illustration of 
the working of that principle. If there were time I might 
next run over all the Christian experiences in turn, and 
show how the same wide law applies to each. But I 
think it may serve the better purpose if I leave this 
further exercise to yourselves. I know no Bible study 
that you will find more full of fruit, or which will take 
you nearer to the ways of God, or make the Christian 
life itself more solid or more sure. I shall add only a 
single other illustration of what I mean, before I close. 

Where does Joy come from? I knew a Sunday scholar 
whose conception of Joy was that it was a thing made in 
lumps and kept somewhere in Heaven, and that when 
people prayed for it, pieces were somehow let down and 
fitted into their souls. I am not sure that views as gross 
and material are not often held by people who ought to 
be wiser. In reality, Joy is as much a matter of Cause 
and Effect as pain. No one can get Joy by merely ask- 
ing for it. It is one of the ripest fruits of the Christian 
life, and, like all fruits, must be grown. There is a very 
clever trick in India called the mango-trick. A seed is 



28 PAX VO BIS CUM. 

put in the ground and covered up, and after divers incan- 
tations a full-blown mango-bush appears within five min- 
utes. I never met any one who knew how the thing was 
done, but I never met any one who believed it to be any- 
thing else than a conjuring-trick. The world is pretty 
unanimous now in its belief in the orderliness of Nature. 
Men may not know how fruits grow, but they do know 
that they cannot grow in five minutes. Some lives have 
not even a stalk on which fruits could hang, even if they 
did grow in five minutes. Some have never planted one 
sound seed of Joy in all their lives ; and others who may 
have planted a germ or two have lived so little in sun- 
shine that they never could come to maturity. 

Whence, then, is Joy? Christ put His teaching upon 
this subject into one of the most exquisite of His para- 
bles. I should in any instance have appealed to His 
teaching here, as in the case of Rest, for I do not wish 
you to think I am speaking words of my own. But it so 
happens that He has dealt with it in words of unusual 
fulness. 

I need not recall the whole illustration. It is the para- 
ble of the Vine. Did you ever think why Christ spoke 
that parable? He did not merely throw it into space as 
a fine illustration of general truths. It was not simply a 
statement of the mystical union, and the doctrine of an 
indwelling Christ. It was that ; but it was more. After 
He had said it, He did what was not an unusual thing 
when He was teaching His greatest lessons. He turned 
to the disciples and said He would tell them why He had 
spoken it. It was to tell them how to get Joy. " These 
things have I spoken unto you," He said, " that My Joy 
might remain in you and that your Joy might be full." 



HOW FRUITS GROW. 2Q 

It was a purposed and deliberate communication of His 
secret of Happiness. 

Go back over these verses, then, and you will find the 
Causes of this Effect, the spring, and the only spring, out 
of which true Happiness comes. I am not going to ana- 
lyse them in detail. I ask you to enter into the words 
for yourselves. Remember, in the first place, that the 
Vine was the Eastern symbol of Joy. It was its fruit that 
made glad the heart of man. Yet, however innocent that 
gladness — for the expressed juice of the grape was the 
common drink at every peasant's board — the gladness 
was only a gross and passing thing. This was not true 
happiness, and the vine of the Palestine vineyards was 
not the true vine. Christ was "the true Vine." Here, 
then, is the ultimate source of Joy. Through whatever 
media it reaches us, all true Joy and Gladness find their 
source in Christ. By this, of course, is not meant that 
the actual Joy experienced is transferred from Christ's 
nature, or is something passed on from Him to us. What 
is passed on is His method of getting it. There is, in- 
deed, a sense in which we can share another's joy or an- 
other's sorrow. But that is another matter. Christ is 
the source of Joy to men in the sense in which He is the 
source of Rest. His people share His life, and therefore 
share its consequences, and one of these is Joy. His 
method of living is one that in the nature of things pro- 
duces Joy. When He spoke of His Joy remaining with 
us He meant in part that the causes which produced it 
should continue to act. His followers, that is to say, by 
repeating His life would experience its accompaniments. 
His Joy, His kind of Joy, would remain with them. 

The medium through which this Joy comes is next ex- 



$0 PAX VOBISCUM. 

plained : " He that abideth in Me, the same bringeth 
forth much fruit." Fruit first, Joy next; the one the 
cause or medium of the other. Fruit-bearing is the nec- 
essary antecedent; Joy both the necessary consequent 
and the necessary accompaniment. It lay partly in the 
bearing fruit, partly in the fellowship which made that 
possible. Partly, that is to say, Joy lay in mere constant 
living in Christ's presence, with all that that implied of 
peace, of shelter, and of love ; partly in the influence of 
that Life upon mind and character and will ; and partly 
in the inspiration to live and work for others, with all 
that that brings of self -riddance and Joy in others' 
gain. All these, in different ways and at different times, 
are sources of pure Happiness. Even the simplest of 
them — to do good to other people — is an instant and in- 
fallible specific. There is no mystery about Happiness 
whatever. Put in the right ingredients and it must come 
out. He that abideth in Him will bring forth much 
fruit ; and bringing forth much fruit is Happiness. The 
infallible receipt for Happiness, then, is to do good ; and 
the infallible receipt for doing good is to abide in Christ. 
The surest proof that all this is a plain matter of Cause 
and Effect is that men may try every other conceivable 
way of finding Happiness, and they will fail. Only the 
right cause in each case can produce the right effect. 

Then the Christian experiences are our own making. 
In the same sense in which grapes are our own making, 
and no more. All fruits grow — whether they grow in 
the soil or in the soul ; whether they are the fruits of the 
wild grape or of the True Vine. No man can make things 
grow. He can get them to grow by arranging all the cir- 
cumstances and fulfilling all the conditions. But the 



HOW FRUITS GROW. 3 1 

growing is done by God. Causes and effects are eternal 
arrangements, set in the constitution of the world ; fixed 
beyond man's ordering. What man can do is to place 
himself in the midst of a chain of sequences. Thus he 
can get things to grow : thus he himself can grow. But 
the grower is the Spirit of God. 

What more need I add but this — test the method by 
experiment. Do not imagine that you have got these 
things because you know how to get them. As well try 
to feed upon a cookery book. But I think I can promise 
that if you try in this simple and natural way, you will 
not fail. Spend the time you have spent in sighing for 
fruits in fulfilling the conditions of their growth. The 
fruits will come, must come. We have hitherto paid im- 
mense attention to effects, to the mere experiences them- 
selves ; we have described them, extolled them, advised 
them, prayed for them — done everything but find out 
what caused them. Henceforth let us deal with causes. 
"To be," says Lotze, "is to be in relations." About 
every other method of living the Christian life there is an 
uncertainty. About every other method of acquiring the 
Christian experiences there is a "perhaps." But in so far 
as this method is the way of nature, it cannot fail. Its 
guarantee is the laws of the universe, and these are " the 
Hands of the Living God." 



32 PAX VOBISCUM. 



THE TRUE VINE. 

"I am the true vine, and my Father is the husband- 
man. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he 
taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he 
purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit. Now ye 
are clean through the word which I have spoken unto 
you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot 
bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine ; no more 
can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are 
the branches : He that abideth in me, and I in him, the 
same bringeth forth much fruit : for without me ye can 
do nothing. If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth 
as a branch, and is withered ; and men gather them, and 
cast them into the fire, and they are burned. If ye abide 
in me, and my word abide in you, ye shall ask what ye 
will, and it shall be done unto you. Herein is my Father 
glorified, that ye bear much fruit ; so ye shall be my 
disciples. As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved 
you : continue ye in my love. If ye keep my command- 
ments, ye shall abide in my love ; even as I have kept 
my Father's commandments, and abide in his love. 
These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might 
remain in you, and that your joy might be full." „ 



THE END. 



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